Sorry to be the party pooper

Who really is the ad speaking to anyway? Gurgaon’s mall-ers? Bangalore’s pub-crawlers? The guy who’s just lost four kilos after working out at the Taj health club? The woman who was gifted fabulous De Beers solitaires for Diwali? Or is this a manifesto for Indians who have fought and won a second freedom struggle, this time from the tyrannical hold of a quarter of the population who are officially deemed to exist below the poverty line and who together constitute the largest group of hungry citizenry in any country in the world (some of them, incidentally, inhabit Madhepura, the Union food minister’s constituency). So has ‘Shining India’ finally seceded from ‘Not-so-shining Bharat’? Going by this ad, that would seem the case.

Of course, there is a great deal ‘Shining India’ can justifiably take pride in. This year, the economy is projected to grow at 6.9 per cent this year; FIIs have poured something like $5 billion into the Indian market; the kharif crop is expected to touch a record 110 million tonnes; telecom is booming, with more than one million mobile phone subscriptions each month; sales in the cars and white goods segments are surging and foreign exchange reserves stand at an all-time high of $90 billion.

But even as ‘Shining India’ congratulates itself on all this, it needs to be conscious that there is a great deal that needs to be done. First, it is the benevolence of the Rain God that has caused this almost 7 per cent growth rate. The good monsoon this time has resulted in a projected increase of 9 per cent in agriculture GDP, which has in turn brightened the general economic outlook. Other sectors — industry, services, exports — have not done that well. What this indicates is that a country so crucially dependent on the monsoon could go right back to last year’s 4.4 per cent growth rate, if the rains fail us again.

The larger point, however, is that growth rates are notoriously inadequate to measure the status of a nation and its people. There is a very good reason to say this. As Dr Amartya Sen keeps pointing out, it would be a mistake to perceive people just as the means of production and not its ultimate end. In other words, if the quality of life of the majority of people does not improve and, in fact, declines despite high national growth rates, growth is of little value. ‘Shining India’ is a great votary of the trickle down theory — that high growth rates will over time propel people out of poverty. But as J.K. Galbraith wryly observed, this is a bit like saying that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through the road for the sparrows.

Unless the mechanisms of distributive justice are in place, the sparrows will not get a speck. China, with its growth rates of 8 per cent and over, is the big inspiration for ‘Shining India’. But if China’s growth levels are sustainable today, it is because its foundations are firm. It made its big moves to secure the welfare of people through guaranteed education, health care, land reform and social security provisions, long before it marketised its economy. Its literacy rate in 1982 — before Comrade Deng brought his cat into the picture — was around 90 per cent. This has ensured that economic growth, when it did take place, was fairly participatory.

In India, by contrast, with its incomplete development, economic growth has only accentuated inequality — across states, within states, between rural and urban areas, between communities. Disparities between states have become so marked today that the less-developed ones are growing not just at levels lower than the national average, but slower than they did a decade ago. Within cities, the slum-high rise dichotomy symbolises two discrete universes. While ‘Shining India’ celebrates its cheaper housing loans, census figures indicate that there still a great deal to be done in ‘Not-so-shining Bharat’ with regard to housing. In 2001, only 51.8 per cent of households have “pucca” houses, more than three out of five households did not have a latrine within the house and only 55.9 per cent households had electricity as a source of lighting. As for the spread effect of the technology revolution, Delhi and Mumbai alone account for one-third of India’s internet use.

But what, arguably, is the disparity that should most worry policy-makers is that between the small number of well-paid professionals and the vast army of the unemployed. At last count, 40.5 million have signed up in the live register of the Employment Exchange of India. The two fired contract workers who burned themselves to death outside the corporate headquarters of the Tata Electric Company recently while demanding their jobs back are just a footnote in an ongoing tragedy.

Where will this lead? Is ‘Shining India’ proudly holding a torch aloft while standing on a cache of explosives? Do political leaders, who are supposed to mediate between the state and the people, have it in them to understand that the prime objective of economic development is to expand the social opportunities for all? These are questions that need to be megaphoned back to those who will presently be climbing on to campaign podiums to ask the people of this country for their votes.